When Awards Season began, everyone said the race was wide open. The Los Angeles Film Critics chose Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as Best Film, the New York Film Critics Circle chose Traffic as Best Film, the National Board of Review named Quills the Best Film of 2000, and the Golden Globes gave Almost Famous its award for Best Picture - Musical/Comedy. As always, the race narrowed as the year continued. Gladiator won the BAFTA for Best Film, the Golden Globe for Best Picture - Drama, and the PGA Award for Outstanding Producers of Theatrical Motion Pictures.
The final group of nominees came down to: Chocolat, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Erin Brockovich, Gladiator, and Traffic. And the film that kept winning, did so again:
As I fully reviewed all the other films of the year in order of their release, I shall do the same here, before ranking them:
Only thrice has one person taken two slots for Best Director. Clarence Brown did it at the 3rd Academy Awards, Michael Curtiz did it at the 11th Academy Awards, and Steven Soderbergh did it at the 73rd Academy Awards.
One of the big stories of the season was Soderbergh's double whammy of Erin Brockovich, proving to be more than "just" a Julia Roberts vehicle, and Traffic, the all-star drug trade epic proving to be just as entertaining as it was Important. But despite being the critics' pick, it was believed he would split his own vote and go home empty-handed. Besides, there were two other more likely would-be winners. One was Ridley Scott, who helmed the movie that, after all, many believed would win, Gladiator. The other was Ang Lee, Taiwanese director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, who was winning the battle against foreign language bias: the Golden Globes, the British Academy, and even the Directors Guild of America named him the Best of the Year. He had the momentum, the industry vote. Rounding out the five was Billy Elliot's Stephen Daldry, this year's representative of Audience-Friendly British Entertainment.
In the end was the beginning. That is to say, the critics awards got it right:
As sometimes happens, the biggest news about the Best Actor nominees was the absence of a shoo-in and the presence of a dark horse.
The great film scholar Nick Davis was writing about the Oscars in 2000, and his predictions for the nominees cite Michael Douglas as a lock and probable winner, with Harris tenth. This is, of course, just one voice, but he was not alone: as Inside Oscar 2 relates, "The year's biggest surprise was the failure of Michael Douglas to be nominated," while "Harris especially was a bit of a surprise...he hadn't received any critics awards and hadn't been up for a Golden Globe or SAG award."
Douglas had also missed at the SAG Awards: remember, Benicio del Toro was up for Lead there (and won), but also nominated was the incredible young find from Billy Elliot, Jamie Bell, who went on to win the BAFTA Award for Best Actor. Alas, like Douglas, he missed out with Oscar, and, like Harris, he missed out on the Globes. Not that getting a nomination there is a guarantee: in addition to Douglas, the entire Best Actor in a Musical/Comedy roster was left off the Oscar ballot: no Jim Carrey for Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, no George Clooney for O Brother, Where Art Thou? (he won the Globe!), no John Cusack for High Fidelity, no Robert De Niro for Meet the Parents, and no Mel Gibson for What Women Want!
Who did get in alongside Harris? The obvious locks were Gladiator's Russell Crowe, leading the now Best Picture favorite, and Cast Away's Tom Hanks, who many felt could have been the frontrunner had he not already won twice before. The critical praise was enough to get Before Night Falls' Javier Bardem through, and while he never won any prizes, Quills' Geoffrey Rush was a constant throughout the season. With Douglas gone, it was anyone's guess which one would win, and I'm sure there was a clenching of bettors' sphincters when Marcia Gay Harden picked up her Oscar earlier in the ceremony. Was the Academy suddenly hot for Pollock, as Roger Ebert guessed they might be?
Best Original Music Score, or whatever the full name is, is always a tough one to judge. To me, it's the score that best complements a film, that does not overwhelm. I have often heard people scoffingly say of some nominated scores, "I don't even remember any themes!" which I don't think is necessarily unfair, but it is a narrow view of the how and why of the score. There are scores that I would never listen to on their own that I have nevertheless included in my own Hollmann Awards because, in context, they transform or even clarify a film's tone, theme, or meaning - I'm thinking specifically of how James Newton Howard's Nightcrawler gets us into Jake Gyllenhaal's warped mindset, or even how Son Lux's Everything Everywhere All At Once is unhummable, sure, but the movie would not work nearly as well without it.
So this is how I approach this category, and I imagine, so do many of the Academy's voters. And that, finally, is how they came to pass up Björk's Dancer in the Dark and Maurice Jarre's Sunshine in favor of Rachel Portman's Chocolat (the only female composer to be nominated in Original Score more than once), Tan Dun's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (the sole first-time nominee...also the sole only-time nominee), Hans Zimmer's Gladiator (though other groups also acknowledged "wailing woman" vocalist and co-composer Lisa Gerrard, the Academy gave sole credit to Zimmer), Ennio Morricone's Malèna (this same year, he received the National Board of Review's Career Achievement Award), and John Williams' The Patriot (even if the score was seventeen cats fighting on untuned pianos, Williams would have been here: in 33 years, 34 of his scores were nominated). Of these composers, only Tan and Morricone never won before...and Morricone would have to wait another decade-plus for his chance:
None of these are bad, all of them greatly boost their films, but - if I had a ballot, here's how I'd rank them:
Was there any beating Benicio del Toro for Best Supporting Actor?
Realistically, probably not. From the moment people started seeing Traffic, the name was on the trophy, with critics like Kenneth Turan immediately singling him out as the film's best performance. Come awards time, he collected a haul of hosannas from the Golden Globes, BAFTAs, LA Film Critics, National Society of Film Critics, and the Screen Actors Guild. His SAG win was particularly miraculous, considering they bumped him up to the Lead Actor category, suggesting that the industry was eager to award that performance no matter where it was placed (it's also indicative of the lack of a real frontrunner in Lead Actor throughout the season).
As tends to be the case with Best Supporting Actor, the Oscar Five was a done deal for a while. The BAFTAs nominated Billy Elliot's Gary Lewis and Gladiator's Oliver Reed, but those were very British decisions: Lewis's performance wasn't a standout here the way young discovery Jamie Bell or previous Oscar nominee Julie Walters were, while, as Inside Oscar 2 describes it, the idea of anyone else nominating Reed, who died during that film's production and whose performance was "completed" with the use of CGI, was too morbid to consider. Some critics' groups, including NYFCC and NSFC, made mention of Fred Willard's hilarious turn in Best in Show, but always as an also-ran, not the winner. And The Contender's villain Gary Oldman filled the SAG slot left vacant by Del Toro's promotion, but his public feud with the film's director Rod Lurie and distributor DreamWorks, plus his reported insistence that he campaign as Lead, left a sour taste in many Academy members' mouths, even if the performance is that film's best.
So no, there was no disrupting the quintet of Del Toro, Oldman's co-star Jeff Bridges, surprise possible upset Willem Dafoe of Shadow of the Vampire, early favorite Albert Finney of Erin Brockovich, and the acclaimed Joaquin Phoenix of Gladiator. And there was no disrupting Del Toro's march to Oscar victory:
The month of May was fruitful for awards season, seeing the release of two films whose popularity and infamy, respectively, lasted well into March of the next year. I refer, of course, to Gladiator and Battlefield Earth.
Gladiator was a hit, Battlefield Earth was a bomb. Gladiator was the #1 film in the USA two weeks in a row, the #3 film of the whole year; Battlefield Earth bankrupted its studio, the #100 film of the whole year. Gladiator won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Battlefield Earth "won" the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture. Are their reputations warranted?
Today is the first of three days' worth of the 2024 Hollmann Awards; the full list of nominees can be seen here. Six categories we'll discuss today, beginning with:
